Alchemy
by scio scribe
Summary: Kyle wants to be Harvey's associate, and he doesn't mind getting Mike out of the way to do it.
1. Chapter 1

I've gotten just enough of this written in advance that I think I can safely promise a chapter a week—I hope you enjoy!

()

**Chapter One**

Kyle went to Phillips Exeter, where he was pretty sure guys like Mike Ross worked in the kitchen. Then he went to Harvard, where Mike had been such a non-entity that no one even remembered him, and for all his isn't-it-impressive photographic memory, he didn't even make the top ten of his class. Kyle had been number two in a year where the number one had been some shut-in who practically never went anywhere but the library and her apartment; Kyle didn't need to work that hard. Everything had always fallen into his lap. Even the position at Pearson Hardman—one interview with Louis, and there it was: the gold medal at the end of the finish line. He'd put in his time, make partner, make _senior _partner, and know that it was exactly what the universe had always had planned for him. He was number one. He was _it_.

Until Mike Ross came along.

Kyle just didn't get it. Mike was a mess. He wore off-the-rack suits that looked like they'd been slept in, he blanked on basic one-L procedures, he got too involved with his clients, he blew the mock trial, and he lost in fucking housing court. He should have been off in some hick town chasing ambulances. Kyle didn't give a damn what kind of memory he had—he didn't belong at Pearson Hardman and he definitely, _definitely _did not deserve to be _Harvey Specter's _associate.

Kyle was in his second year as an associate and he'd been happy working in the general pool only because all the senior partners already had their pet associates picked out and he was sure that he'd get his chance sooner or later. Then he heard that Harvey was moving up. Harvey was a legend. Harvey was a _god_. Kyle wanted to work for him, and Kyle got what he wanted, so he wasn't even surprised to hear the rumor mill grinding away on the info that Harvey was completely uninterested in his scheduled interviews, because it was obviously only fair, only _right_, in the established patterns of the universe, for Harvey to just choose him. Why hire some wet-behind-the-years rookie when Kyle had established chops?

Kyle knew Harvey because he knew that Harvey was just like him.

Then Harvey came back with Mike Ross, who was so far outside the scope of Kyle's universe that Kyle didn't even know what to _do _with him.

But he'd obviously have to do something. _Kyle _was supposed to be Harvey Specter's associate—he just had to correct the little mistake of Mike Ross first.

()

"No one in their right mind," Mike said, "would ever want to work for you." He tried again with no real amount of success to rub the sleep out of his eyes. If he pressed any harder, he'd go blind. "If you're going to get me up at four in the morning, the least you could do is have us meet someplace that serves pancakes."

"Pancakes aren't dignified," Harvey said. "You can't eat pancakes in this suit." He looked Mike over. "Yours would be fine."

"You make up these rules that don't even make sense. People eat pancakes in suits all the time."

"How they got into the suits, I'll never know," Harvey said.

Ordinarily Harvey doing Groucho Marx, complete with waggling eyebrows, would have been an entirely adequate substitute for pancakes, and Mike would have cheerfully tried to get him into a _Duck Soup_-quoting marathon, but this morning he was determined not to be amused. Harvey was trying to bribe him with charm. Mike couldn't pour syrup on charm. He wanted _pancakes_, and the fact that Harvey hadn't outright rejected the possibility told Mike that there was hope.

Still, he had to proceed carefully. What they were working on was, after all, actually important; Harvey hadn't woken him up for no reason. If they didn't find a loophole in the contract their client had signed way too quickly and thoughtlessly, they would have to face the unpleasant possibility of telling her this afternoon that there was no way to save her business from her ex-partner's attempt to sink it beneath her feet out of nothing more than spite. Mike cared about their client, Rosalie Caprey, a woman who wanted nothing more than to get out of this situation with her life intact; Harvey, as always, cared about winning, and maybe a little bit about being able to torpedo any legal agreement he hadn't personally written himself. It was a project worth working on, so Mike kept his head down and his mouth shut for the next hour, his pen flickering over the pages so quickly that the image in his head of the contract always included a long thin line down the center of each sheet of paper. He would get something. He had to. _They _had to.

And then they would get pancakes. A happy ending all around.

He was reading so quickly that he was three pages ahead of himself before his brain skidded to a halt and practically smacked him upside the head with an epiphany. The pen fell out of his hand.

"Got it," he said. He grinned at Harvey. The reason it was okay, sometimes, to come in at four in the morning even with absolutely no pancakes on offer was that there were moments like this, when it seemed like the entire world had just _clicked_ together like a puzzle he'd solved. And he got to impress Harvey. It wasn't a bad deal, all things considered. He found the page he was looking for and slid it to Harvey's side of the table. "They both agreed that any company-wide endeavor relating to expansion had to be approved by all relevant stockholders, regardless of current employment. Of course, her partner doesn't want to expand, he wants to shut it down, so he thinks he's safe—but what's closing them down but _negative _expansion? The end of the _possibility_ of expansion."

"It's nitpicking," Harvey said, a smile spreading irresistibly across his face, "which, in contract law, is another word for winning."

Mike held out his fist. Harvey, amused, bumped it lightly. He didn't even look to see if there were anyone around to see it—though since it was still only five forty-five in the morning, that probably didn't mean as much as Mike would have wanted to think.

"Look at that," he said, not even pretending to check his watch. "It's almost like we still have the perfect amount of time to go get pancakes."

"Do you not keep food in your apartment? Why have you never eaten?"

"I have this boss who's kind of a dick," Mike said. "He keeps making me come into work at these really weird hours and then stay forever, so I never have time to go shopping or cook anything."

"Like you can cook."

"For your information, I make absolutely delicious Easy Mac. –It's like macaroni that you make in the microwave with this nuclear orange cheese powder."

"I think if you'd listen to yourself," Harvey said, "you'd hear that you just described this thing that you're eating as 'like' macaroni as opposed to being 'actually' macaroni, and you'll know that that's sufficient reason for me to be wonder how you're even still alive."

Mike decided not to mention the Ramen, Hot Pockets, and Go-Gurt that had composed the entirety of his shopping list during the year he and Trevor had tried living together. It even made him shudder sometimes. With a single-minded focus that he was going to call admirable rather than obsessive, he said, "That's why you have to take responsibility every now and then and feed me. And take me for walks." If the puppy thing couldn't do him some good from time to time, there was no point to it.

"Okay," Harvey said, "but only because you just based your argument on your complete inability to take care of yourself, and that amuses me."

"Whatever works," Mike said happily. "Let me just go lock this in my desk."

He usually didn't bother—however willing the other associates were to fuck him over, they wouldn't dare mess with anything that was technically Harvey's—but not having the originals of the contract in perfect condition had serious potential to hurt their deal, especially if they were already dealing with a situation laden with malice and a refusal to cut anyone even a little bit of slack. The contract itself called for the ultimate and inviolate presence of the original document, and they couldn't exactly make their case on one loophole while dangling their feet down in another. He couldn't afford to take any chances. So, before he could give Harvey time to change his mind, he dashed off down the hall, file folder in hand, dropped it in the lower drawer of his desk, snapped the lock to, and bounded back.

Harvey stood in the hall, arms crossed, watching him. "You move with all the coordination of a drunken giraffe. This is why you being on a bike is a bad idea."

"I'm good on my bike," he said, a little curtly for someone getting free pancakes, because this was an argument they'd danced around having a thousand times before, and he was getting sick of it. "Come on. Pancakes. _Syrup_."

"I bet sugar made you unbearable as a kid," Harvey said.

"I was adorable."

"See, but I can't take your word for that, because you think you're adorable now."

"I _must _be adorable, you're taking me out for pancakes."

Harvey shook his head, smiling. Mike, fueled by victory and the imminent possibility of stacked hotcake goodness, could have kept this up the entire morning, but he dropped the back-and-forth a little when they passed Kyle coming in. They were by him in a second, but there was no picking up where he had left off—Harvey never missed anything. In some other universe, he was probably a private detective in a trenchcoat instead of a suit, and still incredibly sarcastic to his clients. Personalities would have to remain consistent across multiple dimensions—

"You should try to get along with the other associates," Harvey said.

"They're mostly assholes."

"True, but you're not exactly a fluffy bunny rabbit yourself, if we look over your history and narrowly avoided criminal record."

"Being a criminal didn't mean I was an asshole," Mike said, stung. "It meant I was a criminal. It's a whole different thing, and you know it. Those guys, all they care about is—"

He stopped hard, almost biting down on his tongue, because he was about to say something that he didn't really want to say. Not now, anyway, when it was sunny and they were on their way to get pancakes. He didn't want to point out that sometimes the only difference between Harvey and Mike's fellow associates was that Harvey could back up his arrogance and sugar-coat it, if he had to. In the end, after the mock trial that was still stuck in his head like some obelisk casting everything half into shadow, Harvey had, after all, told him that he'd screwed up by being nice, because it was a lawyer's job to cut to the bone. When he and Harvey tangled, it was always and stupidly over this—what kind of person he was going to be, at the end of the day, and whether it was too late for Harvey to be anyone but Harvey, polished and successful and intermittently not really very nice.

It wasn't a conversation he'd ever liked having and it wasn't one he wanted to have now.

"All they care about is hooking a senior partner," he finished weakly. "Or making partner. Or sleeping with my girlfriend. It's this whole competitive thing."

"The law _is_ competition."

"Aristotle said the law was reason free from passion."

"Aristotle never practiced in New York."

"I'm just saying that it's a little hard to build a friendship when you're worried the other person's going to shove a knife in your back."

"I never told you to braid their hair," Harvey said. "I said you should get along better—as in, not be so preoccupied giving them death glares that you stop talking."

"Do you get along with other lawyers?" He was getting a little desperate for a change of topic. Come hell or high water _or _Harvey's best advice, he would not be making friends with Kyle. He still remembered how Kyle's hand had kept creeping up the curve of Rachel's hip when they had all gone out to dinner and how Kyle had smirked at him throughout, as if it were some weird show he was putting on all for Mike. "I mean, there's your incredible rapport with Louis."

"This isn't about me," Harvey said. "You're deflecting."

Mike raised his eyebrows. "_You're _deflecting."

"I get along with Jessica."

"You _work _for Jessica, _and_ you're keeping a massive secret from her, _and_ you blackmailed her to keep your promotion."

"You blackmailed me to keep your job," Harvey said. "And you work for me. Do we get along?"

"Okay, so it doesn't count," Mike said. "But name one other lawyer besides Jessica and besides me that you actually like spending time with, and I'll take one of the associates out for drinks on Friday." If he lost, he would make do with Harold, who was too sheepishly inoffensive to ever last at Pearson Hardman, however much he dogged Louis's heels, and Mike would listen to him talk about training homing pigeons for an hour and half. At least there'd be beer.

"Scotty," Harvey said.

"You're sleeping with Scotty."

Something went over Harvey's face too quickly for Mike to even really see what it was, but it left him feeling a little emptied out, like he'd missed something he should have paid more attention to, but the chance for it wouldn't come again. "Not at the moment."

"Whatever," he said lightly, "it still counts her out. It's like with me and Jessica—exceptions."

"If you're good at it," Harvey said, "you can build a whole life on exceptions."

Occasionally Harvey would do that—drop whatever ball they were tossing back and forth and give him, instead, some strangely beautiful but deeply inscrutable piece of advice that sounded more like a Zen koan and didn't belong at all next to his usual tips, which were mostly just "don't go to court" and "please don't stand next to me when you're wearing that." It had happened often enough by now that Mike should have been used to it, but it still threw him each and every time. Right then it shut him up and distracted him to the point that he barely noticed when Harvey swung off into an alley and pressed his hand flat against some dark wooden door that looked like as scratched and gouged as if everyone in Manhattan had taken their keys to it. He stumbled up a second later than Harvey held the door and only just missed catching it with his face.

"Ow," he said, to make a point about holding doors for people longer than _seven milliseconds_. Not that Harvey noticed. "What is this place?"

"Best pancakes in the city," said the man who two hours ago had been claiming with all evident serious that pancakes were childish things that couldn't be eaten in his current wardrobe, yet for some reason knew a pancake house within _walking distance _of his office. "Did you think I was taking you to IHOP?"

"Hey, I like IHOP," Mike protested. "They have those chocolate pancakes with the chocolate chips where they do the smiley face in whipped cream." He had the sneaking suspicion that Harvey knew that those were only on the kid's menu but delighted in setting up a situation where Harvey couldn't mock him for that without revealing a working knowledge of a pancake franchise with perpetually sticky tabletops. "How did you find this place? It's sort of—difficultly located."

"Cameron," Harvey said shortly. "District attorneys get superstitious. He had this theory that if you skipped breakfast the morning of a trial, you'd always lose, so he would drag us here if we were going to court. They cooked the pancakes, he cooked the cases, and at least this place is still standing."

"Okay," Mike said. "I'm going to not talk."

"Normally a goal I'd encourage," Harvey said, smiling at least a little, "but not necessary. It was a long time ago."

He tried to imagine Harvey young, relatively innocent, his hair a little less shellacked into place; Harvey forking pancakes into his mouth before going off to fight evil. Maybe he'd been different then. Maybe Cameron Dennis _broke _him.

"Well, now _we _come here for pancakes," Mike said. If he could cheer Harvey up while simultaneously wrangling a new tradition that meant he'd be eating free pancakes for a few years to come, he would totally take it. He elbowed Harvey to a nearby table. "No menus."

"You order pancakes. Don't add anything that's going to stain your teeth. You need a menu for that?"

"I like menus."

"You like _memorizing _menus."

"Same thing."

When a server finally appeared, they both ordered short stacks and coffee, and Mike asked for powdered sugar just to irritate Harvey. "It doesn't stain."

"No, it's just annoying. You get it on your suit, it'll never brush off, and it makes you look like you've been snorting cocaine in the bathroom every twenty minutes."

He hadn't thought about that. "I just—won't get it on my suit, then," he said, and tried to radiate serene confidence. He was pretty sure that Harvey would have eaten a mountain of powdered sugar without ending up with so much of a grain of it on his lapels. "Anyway, maybe nobody's mind will go there. Not everyone's as pessimistic as you."

"True," Harvey said. "Then you'll just like you've escaped from serving funnel cakes at a carnival."

Mike felt his face sink as the pancakes arrived, dusted about three inches high with powdered sugar. The instant he touched his fork to it, it _poofed _out and scattered everywhere. Harvey, mildly starting on his own peril-free stack of pancakes, said, "You look like a snow princess."

Mike blinked. Powdered sugar fell out of his eyelashes.

"When we get back," he said hopefully, "can I borrow your extra suit?"

()

Kyle didn't know how Harvey put up with it. Even though Mike had shut up pretty quickly once he'd seen Kyle coming, it wasn't like their little victory conversation had been hard to overhear—and it was all ridiculous self-aggrandizing bullshit about how cute Mike was. Who the hell talked like that? Who cared? And he couldn't even tell that Harvey was just humoring him, for whatever reason—pretending to be entertained by that crap. Obviously Harvey was banking on Mike's freakish memory to make up for any deficiencies and that was why he tolerated everything else.

That was fine. Harvey had missed most of the mock trial, he just didn't understand how good Kyle was at his job. Kyle could kick Mike's ass in the courtroom any day of the week—what he needed now was an opportunity to prove it.

He knelt down beside Mike's desk. There was no one else in the office, not at this hour. That was another reason why he was perfect for Harvey—he came in early without someone having to drag him out of bed.

The bottom drawer was locked. That was good—it meant that he was right, that Mike had stashed his papers there before heading out with Harvey. Locked was good.

He could deal with that just fine.


	2. Chapter 2

**Chapter Two**

"Years from now, when I'm a Supreme Court Justice, and you're on your third trophy wife, I'm still going to say that this was my proudest day as a lawyer. Think about it. I solved a major contract dispute, talked you into pancakes, _and _got your spare suit."

"I don't do trophy wives," Harvey said, "and if you take that vest off, I'll send Louis a picture of you with powdered sugar all over your face."

"I can't believe I was choking on sugar and you took the time to take a picture with your phone."

"Really? Because it sounds to me exactly like something I would do." Harvey drummed his fingers against the cubicle wall while Mike got down on his knees to fish the contract file from his desk drawer. "You know, I never thought I'd say this, but I look forward to the day they give you your own office. All these people packed in here like sardines is a little dispiriting."

"Social criticism on par with Dickens," Mike said. "Wait, do you have any control over when I get an office? Can I have one with a window?"

"Sorry. I don't get involved with where they put people. It's too much like _actually_ getting involved with people. How long does it take you to unlock a drawer?"

"It's stuck," he said, and gave the handle another hard yank as illustration. "Give me a second."

"Because you look ridiculous sitting on the floor."

"You're just worried I'm going to get something on your suit."

"They don't vacuum down here much," Harvey said. "It's a legitimate concern. –Do you just have no upper body strength at all?"

"You think it's so easy, you do it," Mike said, standing up and pointedly brushing off his knees. "Astound me with your drawer-opening prowess. God, you're like two seconds away from being all 'anything you can do I can do better.'"

"Only because it's true," Harvey said. He crouched down, smiled briefly at the drawer, and, with one smooth tug, sent it gliding open.

"Well, okay," Mike said, "if you're going to be a _dick _about it."

Harvey didn't say anything. He stayed down, balanced on the balls of his feet, staring into the drawer. "Mike," he said, and something turned in Mike's chest like a corkscrew, because he had only heard Harvey come close to panic once or twice and now he heard it again—the way Harvey's voice tamped down carefully around the edges of his name. Something was bad. Something was very, very bad. "Where's the file?"

Mike rolled his eyes. "Harvey, that's not even funny. It's right there."

"No, it's not," Harvey said, and the fact that he stood up, hands empty, proved it in a way that even his voice hadn't. Mike darted over and looked down; saw nothing but the black bottom of the drawer, which suddenly seemed bizarrely like a cavern, or a mouth that would swallow him whole. He couldn't get enough air and he grabbed at his tie.

"Harvey, no, I put it in there, I swear. I put it in and I locked it."

"But the drawer was stuck," Harvey said.

"It wasn't _stuck _before, I must have just closed it too hard!"

"But you don't remember."

No. He didn't. In fact, in his head he saw it closing smoothly, and he heard the click of the lock. "I just—Harvey, I _put it in there_. What else would I have done with it?"

"I don't know," Harvey said. His jaw was tight. "Where do you leave your phone half the time?"

"This isn't the same thing!"

"I don't care. _Find _it. I don't care if you pull the damn thing out of your ass, just get it and meet me in my office," and he stalked off, his back and neck so freakishly rigid that it looked like he was a wind-up toy, his legs moving separately from the rest of him. It was another thing, like that controlled panic in his voice, that made Mike feel like he was going to throw up. He had crossed some Rubicon of Harvey showing emotion. He got down on the floor again and pawed stupidly at the persistent and solid bottom of the drawer, as if it would peel up like foil and reveal that the folder had just been in some _secret compartment _all along.

He had _put _it there. He had absolutely put it there. Hadn't he? He must have. He remembered it.

But his memory was eidetic, not photographic—he had a _good _memory for the visual, but not a perfect one, and sometimes it felt like it had all the consistency of Swiss cheese. Still, there was nothing else he could possibly have done with the file. He'd known how important it was. He'd known that he had to keep it safe and out of everyone's way so he wouldn't have to bring it to the meeting drenched in someone's half-caff vanilla latte spill. He had _thought_, distinctly, about putting it in the drawer, about how it was even a little over-cautious, because no one would be stupid enough to mess with Harvey's files anyway. He pressed a hand to his mouth. It felt like the whole office was spinning around him—when had they put that revolving floor in, again?—and he remembered the time he'd been so entirely convinced that he'd unplugged the hot plate that he hadn't even gone back to check when he'd hesitated with his hand on the doorknob, going out, and how it had scorched the countertop _black_ by the time he got home.

This had to be different. This wasn't a _reflex_ thing. It had been a conscious decision. And he hadn't gone anywhere else, right? He hadn't done anything?

Where the _hell _had his head been? Oh, right: on pancakes. His stomach gave another uneasy turn. If he'd lost crucial and irreplaceable paperwork because he'd been too focused on getting Harvey to take him out for fucking _pancakes_—

He tore his desk apart. By the end of it, he was sitting on the floor, all thoughts of preserving Harvey's suit gone, with drawers scattered all around him: he was an island in a sea of pieces of broken pencil lead, scraps of paper, a tape ball, rubber bands, and—fuck his life—one of the business cards that Harvey had ordered for him. _Mike Ross, Associate, Pearson Hardman_. He shakily gathered everything up and put the desk back together, sliding each drawer carefully into place, as though they were all made of crystal. The other associates were filing in now as it was getting up to seven. One or two of them shot him a weird sideways glance. He guessed he probably did look strange, dusty and white-faced, standing there in a suit just a little too big for him.

One more way he didn't measure up to Harvey.

He gathered himself together and did the best he could to brush off the suit. There was nothing else to do but go upstairs and face Harvey. He kept thinking about the Romans feeding Christians to the lions, which they had probably done only because they didn't have an angry Harvey. The closer the elevator inched to his floor, the lower Mike's heart sank inside his chest. If he were really, spectacularly lucky, he'd have an aneurysm before he made it to Harvey's office. Even _Harvey _probably wouldn't be mad at him if he were dead.

He didn't die. He pushed Harvey's door open.

"Harvey, I don't know what happened. I can't—" The dread had given him tunnel vision and he didn't even notice that Kyle was in the room until he was two paces in. Years of his grandmother's instilled manners took over and forced him to be polite, even with cold sweat prickling the back of his neck. "Kyle, would you mind giving us a minute?"

"Not necessary," Harvey said, and he held up a cardboard folder that Mike recognized immediately. His heart gave a resounding thump as it rocketed back into place. He felt like he'd been holding his breath for the last hour.

"You found it," he said, smiling at Harvey goofily. "Did I put it up here?"

"Kyle found it." Harvey nodded to him. "In the associate's break room. Under a half-eaten donut."

That made zero sense. Why would he have gone to the break room when they were about to leave for breakfast? Why would he have had a _donut_? Okay, admittedly, it wasn't outside the realm of possibility that something with sprinkles could have distracted him from a pancake-stocked future, but why would he have been in there in the first place?

"I just saw it there, and since I knew that Harvey was working on the Madsen/Caprey negotiation, I thought he might be missing it." Kyle shrugged. Mike was pretty sure he was attempting modesty but didn't have the experience to pull it off.

He could have asked why Kyle, so preoccupied with being helpful, hadn't just brought the file to _him_, considering he'd been right outside the break room reducing his desk to rubble, but he knew _exactly_ why Kyle hadn't: Kyle wasn't interested in impressing Mike. He was interested in impressing Harvey. Whatever—Mike wouldn't begrudge him that, not since he'd found the damned file, but it was just another example of what he didn't like about being a lawyer. Kyle could have covered for him, and instead he'd shown him up. And Harvey, he could tell, wasn't so blown away with happiness at having the contract back in his hands that he'd completely forgotten or forgiven the moment of panic he'd had when it hadn't been where Mike had said it was. Mike sighed.

"Thanks," he said to Kyle. No point in _openly _hating him. "You're a lifesaver, man, really."

"Thank you," Harvey said to him. "Again."

"Just trying to help," Kyle said.

Mike tried really hard not to punch him in the face. He made it, but only just.

Kyle sat there for another few awkward seconds, like he thought that there was something else coming, but once Harvey actually started just flipping through the file, he stood up and said, "Let me know if there's anything else I can do," and left. Mike scowled after him.

"Okay, I knew I screwed up, but that guy—"

Harvey slapped the file shut. It sounded bizarrely like a door being closed. So they were off the lighthearted banter part of the morning, then.

"Do you know what it would have meant if he hadn't found this?"

"Yes, but—_Harvey_—" That was way too close to a whine. He tried to settle it down. "Harvey, I don't—why would I have gone to the break room? That doesn't even make any sense!"

"Well, fortunately I gave up on expecting _anything _you do to make sense. Mike, you have to get your head in the game. You're still playing at being a lawyer—'oh, let's solve this contract dispute and then go get pancakes'—but guys like Kyle take it seriously, and that's what will give them an edge in the long run. The fact that people like you more than they like him isn't going to matter when it's time to make partner or choose representation. People are going to want someone that they can trust to keep their head down, do the job, and not get so distracted by the possibility of _sugar _that they lose track of their damn confidential contract work that _determines the outcome of the whole case._"

Mike pressed his lips together. Anything he wanted to say in his own defense—from _But I don't want to be Kyle_ to _But I don't get why I went into the break room_—would have sounded plaintive and, worse still, childish. Besides, it wasn't like Harvey was wrong about any of it. There was no arguing with the evidence: he must have just gotten his head turned around this morning, and so he deserved to get chewed out over it. He might as well own up to it without staring at his shoes. He raised his eyes and looked Harvey dead on, not liking that he couldn't read Harvey's expression at the moment, when the knowledge of how to tell what Harvey was thinking was something he thought he'd all but mastered by now.

"You're right," he said softly. "I'm sorry. I was careless."

"It doesn't happen again," Harvey said.

"No."

"Good," Harvey said. "Get that ridiculous messenger bag of yours, we have a hostile take-over to thwart."

Relief hit him a wave. "Wow," he said. "You said 'thwart.'"

"Would you prefer 'foil?'"

"Stymie," Mike said. He hesitated. "You know that Kyle wanted you to invite him to come with you, right? He figured you'd ground me."

"I know what he wanted," Harvey said, "and you have him to thank for you _not _being stuck here, too."

"Because he found the file."

"No," Harvey said, picking up his briefcase, "because he annoyed me to the extent that he reminded me why I hired you to begin with."

Mike grinned. "That's sweet, Harvey."

"You really had to stop and have a donut," Harvey said, shaking his head. "Unbelievable."

"Maybe I was hungry because someone woke me up at four in the morning!" he called out into the hall as Harvey brushed past him, still shaking his head. "Maybe if you didn't have this apparent policy that food is a _reward_ and not a _necessity_, I wouldn't have—" But Harvey was too far away to hear him now, so he stopped: anyway, that weird prickle of tension was back in his chest again. It still didn't make sense to him. He'd been pretty awake by the time he'd left to take the file to his desk—awake and flush with victory—why couldn't he remember stopping in the break room?

And why the hell had there been donuts there before anyone else showed up, anyway?

()

Kyle couldn't believe it. He had done everything right. He'd taken the file and gone straight to Harvey with it—he even had a plausible story of where he'd found it, since _everyone _knew that Mike went berserk around the possibility of sugar—and Harvey had been obviously relieved to have it back and grateful to Kyle for finding it and bringing it to him. He had no idea where he had gone wrong. Harvey was _supposed _to stick Mike in the office and let Kyle come with him to the negotiation. Kyle had even "let it slip" that he'd always found contract negotiations fascinating.

There was no reason for things to have not gone according to plan.

He replayed the conversation in his head.

"Mr. Specter?" He'd knocked on the side of the door even though Donna had ushered him in already—so he'd been polite. "I thought maybe you were looking for this." Held out of the file. "I found it in the break room. Like, under someone's half-eaten donut." He'd laughed. So—good manners, sense of humor, initiative. Nothing to dislike there. Picture perfect associate.

"You're a godsend," Harvey had told him, after confirming it was the right file. "It would have hamstrung us if this hadn't turned up."

"Right," he'd said, "the negotiations. You found something to save Caprey's control of her company?"

"Mike did," Harvey had said, a little distracted by counting the pages. Kyle could have told him that everything was there. It wasn't like it had ever been out of his hands, after all.

"That's great." Fake smile. "Contract negotiations are always so intense. Fascinating. I'd love to sit in. And I'm not Ross—I wouldn't be doodling the whole time." Another laugh. Enthusiasm, just the right hint of ambition, and the sense of humor again—with that bonus little jab at Mike, entirely justified by the fact that he'd once sat through an entire meeting where Mike had done nothing but make a mini flip-book of a spaceship exploding in the corners of his notepad. "Or losing your files under Krispy Kremes."

"Probably not," Harvey said, but something had gone out of the room. Kyle couldn't seem to tap into the same groove with him again. All his attention was on the file now, and it felt a little annoyingly like a dismissal, but that couldn't have been true, not when he'd done everything right, not when he'd been exactly the kind of associate someone like Harvey would want.

He tried again. "I don't know what would have happened if I hadn't found this. He always loses—" But then Mike had come in, stuck in full-on panic mode, eyes giant, and what the hell had been up with his _suit_, anyway? Fuck, Kyle would have kicked him out just on the basis of _that_: clothes too big and still a little silvery with dust. It was no way for a lawyer to look.

Then, obviously, Harvey had tuned him out because he needed Kyle to leave so he could kick Mike's ass. Kyle couldn't argue with that, although it would have been better if he could have watched, or if Harvey had given him the prize right in front of Mike. Still, maybe if he hung around outside, he'd get the spectacle of Mike leaving with his head down, and Harvey would see him and think this time to invite him to come along.

All he saw, instead, was Harvey coming out of the office first, looking weirdly _bemused_, while Mike yelled after him—more "look how cute I am" shit about donuts and food—and then came out himself, brow a little furrowed, but definitely not looking like someone who had just gotten his ass handed to him. He breezed right by Kyle and didn't even see him. He wasn't still going to the negotiation. He _couldn't _be. Harvey couldn't be that blinded by him that he would just ignore a screw-up on the level of that missing file.

Maybe he should have found it later, given Harvey more time to worry about it so that he would have been a little more thankful when it had turned up.

Or maybe it would have been better if he'd never "found" it at all. He'd tried to make himself look good to Harvey, but in the process, he'd basically ensured that losing the file wasn't going to get Mike fired. But if Mike were gone—then Kyle would have ample time to impress Harvey, and Harvey wouldn't have anybody to distract him from realizing just how great a team they would be together. He didn't _like _the prospect of putting Mike out on the street, necessarily, but hey—couldn't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.

And people like him, people like Harvey—they didn't let people like Mike Ross stand in their way.


	3. Chapter 3

**Chapter Three**

Lately, things had gotten—weird.

"It's like this," he said to Benjamin when they were having lunch while playing their increasingly more deadlocked game of Risk. "Every time I think I remember where I left something, I'm wrong. Never _implausibly _wrong, but almost always still wrong. I think I put my pencil in my pencil cup—"

"You have a pencil cup?" Benjamin asked as he tried to invade Asia.

Mike turned back his forces. "Yeah, sure. It's convenient. Why wouldn't I?"

"It's a little—juvenile."

"Dude, you have a Spiderman Band-Aid on. And when are you going to get that I'm not giving up control of Asia? Attack somewhere else." He took another bite of his club sandwich and tried not to drip mayo on the board, since Benjamin could be a little bit of a control freak about that. "Anyway, so I think I'll have dropped it in the pencil cup and then I'll find it in the pencil drawer."

"It's the digital age, Mike, why do you have so many pencils?"

"I don't know, it helps me think to go longhand every now and then."

"You're a complete disappointment to the computer revolution," Benjamin said. "Can I have one of your French fries?"

Mike gave him a French fry. "So what do you think?"

"Undersalted."

"About the stuff going missing, _Ben_."

"Don't call me Ben," Benjamin said automatically. "I don't know. You're here all the time. You're probably just a little scattered—I mean, how many times have I had to tell you to change your password? And every morning I check, and you haven't."

"You—check my password every morning?"

"Big Brother is watching you," Benjamin said. "And he would like you to pay more attention to cyber-security." He moved his forces into position to go against Asia again.

Just for that, Mike dropped a glob of mayonnaise on the board.

When he tried to talk to Jenny about it, she at least didn't keep mounting ridiculously futile military ventures in the middle of his conversation. She just listened to him and nodded. Then, when he had finished explaining the grand conspiracy of insanity that meant that the pencil kept moving from the cup to the drawer, she looked at him solemnly with her beautiful eyes, cupped his face in her hands, and said, "Sweetie, I think it's probably aliens. Or gremlins. Did you feed them after midnight again? You know how they get when you do that."

"Okay," Mike said, pulling away, "so you're obviously not taking this as seriously as I'd hoped."

"Your mysteriously moving pencil? Yeah, I don't think we have to call _Unsolved Mysteries _about that one just yet. You do realize that your dry cleaning has been ready to be picked up for like a week, right? They've left you about ten messages."

"That's not the same thing!"

"It's never the same thing when you don't want it to be," Jenny said. She folded her legs under her. "And the only reason you're forgetting everything lately is that you've been so stressed. You need to talk to Harvey about cutting back your hours a little."

Mike laughed. "Yeah, I don't think that's a conversation I'm going to be having."

"He can't just run you ragged."

"He's my senior partner. I think he can duct tape me to the flagpole outside the building in my underwear if he wants to and no one will give a damn. And the one thing you _don't _tell Harvey is that you need a break because your pencil keeps getting possessed."

"That might be the one thing you don't tell _anyone_, Mike," she said. "But I thought you said Harvey liked you. I'm sure he wouldn't—"

"He does like me," Mike said. "Sort of. A little. Sometimes. He likes that I read really fast and remember stuff? I don't think he'd like me _not _remembering stuff, and I _really _don't think he'd like me blaming him for it. Besides, all associates work eighty hour weeks, or a hundred. If I can't hack it, he's just going to say that I'm not trying hard enough. And I'm not that stressed, anyway—or if I am, it's only because my office supplies have taken on minds of their own. I had to do the same copying _three times _yesterday because I kept losing it. God, he was pissed, it took forever."

"Well, it's not like you to be careless," Jenny said, "whether you're forgetting stuff or not. My advice would be to tell Harvey that you're a little out of it lately and just trust that he's going to know what to do. You can't be the first associate in Pearson Hardman history to go through a rough patch."

So the next morning, he took her advice, and confessed sheepishly to Harvey: "I'm a little out of it lately."

"A little? Lately?"

"Okay," he said, "not really the awe-inspiring comfort and reassurance that I was hoping for."

"Mike, last week it took you two hours to find your notes because you'd accidentally left them in the bathroom, and why you _had _them in the bathroom in the first place isn't even something I want to know."

"You didn't have to Purell them," Mike said. "That was overreacting a little. They weren't on the _floor_, they were on the little counter thing, where people put their umbrellas." He really hoped that Harvey didn't know that the little counter thing was only in the women's restroom. He just got distracted sometimes and opened the wrong door! It could happen to anyone. Sometimes he didn't even notice that there weren't urinals, he just noticed that it smelled better. Sort of floral. He really had to talk to somebody about why the men's room didn't merit air freshener. "But that's my point. I wasn't like this before. You have to remember that there was a time when I wasn't losing my mind, right?"

Harvey rolled his eyes, which seemed a little unnecessary, but relented: "I do have some vague memory of you seeming less like you were going to spontaneously wander out into traffic if I left you alone."

"Um, thanks?"

"So why is your brain melting?" Harvey checked his watch. "Be warned, you have about two minutes before I lose all interest in this."

"Wait, seriously, you're giving me a time limit for my—"

"One minute fifty-five seconds."

"So-Jenny-thinks-maybe-I'm-tired-but-I-don't-think-I'm-any-more-tired-than-usual-because-we-always-work-a-lot-and-Benjamin-thinks-I-just-get-distracted-and-Rachel-thinks-I-should-leave-her-alone-when-she's-working-and-Donna-says-I-underestimate-how-much-you—well-not-_care_, but—take-an-interest-in-my-general-well-being-and-so-if-I-have-concerns-I-should-talk-to-you." He paused to gasp for air. Harvey looked like he was still trying to decide whether this was funny or just pathetic. He said, slower, because he'd gotten all the exposition done in like thirty seconds flat, "It really worries me because of what happened with my grandfather. He—they said that he was really young, that it was early-onset, and my brain's _already _weird—"

"Mike," Harvey said, no longer looking at his watch now, "you don't have early-onset Alzheimer's. I can essentially promise you that. Losing track of a few things isn't the same as losing your mind."

"Okay," he said. He hadn't even told Jenny that. He'd been really young when his grandfather, who had made him hand-carved wooden alphabet blocks and a Noah's ark and a little xylophone, had started forgetting things, first little things, and then big things, and then he hadn't even known Mike's name or how to carve a perfect little lion out of a chunk of ash. It was around the same time that everyone had started telling him how amazing he was for remembering everything. It hadn't been the most fortunate intersection of life events.

But if Harvey said that that wasn't what was happening, then it wasn't, no matter how frantically something in the pit of his stomach tried to convince him that it was every time something wasn't where he left it. Harvey didn't make mistakes—Mike was totally not saying that out loud—and he definitely didn't offer false reassurances. Okay? Okay.

"Then I'm just going insane," he said. "And you should just—fire me, because I have no idea what's happening."

"Don't be melodramatic, Mike, no one's staging an opera in here. You have to go to Louis's office for that."

"Yeah, that's another thing," Mike said, charitably not pointing out that it had been Harvey who had, a minute ago, gone all _reductio ad absurdum _with the whole "wandering out into traffic" thing and so was _not _the person to be giving a lecture on melodrama. "When I do stuff for Louis, I don't screw it up. I don't lose things. I complete tasks with all my usual style, verve, and competence."

Harvey stared at him. "Verve?"

"You know verve. You have verve. It's the difference between you and Louis."

"There are a million differences between me and Louis."

"Yeah, and one of them is apparently that I can do Louis's work for him without sabotaging myself." He ran his hands through his hair. "Maybe you intimidate me."

"I have that effect on people."

"Only you didn't _before_."

"Not even a little?" Harvey seemed disappointed by that.

Mike ignored him. "Can I do my work in here? Maybe it's less distracting. Not so many people around. Less—testosterone-fueled competition." He looked at Harvey. "Okay, _marginally _less testosterone-fueled competition. And definitely fewer paper airplanes."

"Actually," Harvey deadpanned, "that's all I do when you're not here. Make paper airplanes."

"Doesn't surprise me. Can I stay?"

"Ask your mother," Harvey said.

"Donna, can I stay?"

"Don't ever call me his mother again," Donna said through the intercom.

"She says yes," Mike said. "And you realize that you just made yourself my dad in this scenario, right?"

"Don't push it," Harvey said. "You can sit over there."

"Can we go play catch?"

"I'll send you right back downstairs."

Mike began to hum "Cat's in the Cradle." When he finally got Harvey to smile, he tucked his head down and dug into his stack of paperwork. He worked straight on through lunch, and he didn't lose a damned thing. Maybe his life was finally coming back together.

()

Kyle couldn't tell whether his new plan was working or not. He knew that Harvey had been getting a little pissed at how long it took Mike to do even the simplest task, and he knew that Mike was going a little insane—he was _obsessed _with that pencil. Kyle had really only moved it the first time as just a general attempt to screw with him, but once he saw how much it bothered him, he couldn't help switching it every time he walked by. It was the only thing he felt bad about, actually, since it wasn't even helping him get to Harvey. It was just _funny_. But all in all, a pissed off Harvey Specter and a slightly nuts Mike Ross didn't necessarily add up to him moving up the ladder. It didn't help that Kyle, multi-talented though he was, couldn't exactly tail them outside the office and guarantee that Mike kept screwing up out there, too. Plus, it wasn't like he didn't have his own work to do.

And now that Mike was holed up in Harvey's office all the time, like some kid too afraid to let go of Daddy's hand, it was impossible for Kyle to touch him—though he did steal the damn pencil, just as a matter of principle. He tried to believe that Harvey was only letting Mike share his space to keep a closer eye on him so things wouldn't go missing all the time, but whenever he found an excuse to walk by, half the time the two of them were chatting, and Harvey looked like he didn't _mind _having Mike chained to him all the time.

Kyle tried to keep a handle on the situation. There was no need to overreact. So Harvey had a weakness for Mike, so they had a _rapport_. That didn't mean he'd tolerate an infinite series of screw-ups—probably Kyle's plan would have worked eventually if they hadn't started sharing office space all the time. Harvey would still be better off with an associate who knew what he was doing and who didn't need to be babysat all the time. He would realize that sooner or later.

Kyle just needed to move things along a little.

Hey, thinking on your feet was part of being a good lawyer.

()

"The pencil is now _gone_," Mike told Harvey.

Harvey raised his eyebrows. "Really?"

"I swear. It's just not even there anymore. I checked everywhere."

"My God," Harvey said. "What kind of_ monster_—Mike, I have no idea what you're talking about."

He recapped the saga of the mysterious relocating pencil. "And then today, I looked, and it wasn't in the cup _or _the drawer. _Any _of the drawers."

"This is a joke, right?"

"No, it really wasn't there!"

"Mike," Harvey said, "it's a _pencil_, not the Hope Diamond. Why are you even using a pencil? I'm fairly confident that I've seen a computer at your desk."

"You and Benjamin should really get together sometime," Mike said under his breath.

He sat down heavily. The pencil _mattered_, even if no one else thought it did. He knew that it was just a pencil and that there were a thousand more just like it in the office supply closet—so either someone else liked working longhand and thought the associates might need some good old-fashioned writing tools or they'd been in there since the seventies (which was probably also the last time someone had _dusted _the supply closet)—but the thing about the pencil was that it confirmed for him that there was something really wrong about the way things had been going. He could understand losing track of a file. He could understand having to redo all his paperwork. He would be the first one to admit that he could sort of space out and put things down in the wrong place—or the wrong bathroom—and then forget about them.

But the very fact that he was the only one who cared about the pencil moving around all the time had _made _him pay attention to it—way more than he would have if even one person had agreed, however off-handedly, that it was sort of weird. He would use the pencil, drop it into the cup, and listen with all his concentration to the exact noise it made as the eraser thudded against the bottom. Once, he even took a _picture _of it in there. And then there it was in his drawer when he got back. And he knew that Harvey—and Donna, and Jenny, and Rachel, and Benjamin, and his _grandmother_—would all just stare at him before saying very patiently that he must have just used it afterwards and then forgotten about it, he knew to a _certainty _that he hadn't.

Or, okay, even if he _had_, he still wouldn't have lost the stupid thing entirely. That was the last straw. That was what proved to him that this wasn't all just in his head. Whatever this was, it was real.

Which could only mean one thing.

He was at war with supernatural forces.

Ha. Yeah, right.

No, someone was screwing with him. All he had to do was find out who.

Then he was going to kick some ass. He knew that he _looked _like it would be easy to beat him up, but like he'd told Rachel, he wrestled in high school. And he grew up in a really bad neighborhood.

He knew what to do in a fight, and he didn't always fight fair.

"Don't worry," he told Harvey, feeling confident for the first time in what felt like months. "This pencil thing? I've got it under control. Everything's taken care of."

"It's a pencil," Harvey said. "I will buy you another pencil. If you never mention any of this again."

"Right, because I can be bribed that easily."

"Fine, a pencil and an ice cream cone," Harvey said wearily.

"I don't know where everyone gets the idea that I just go all weak in the knees when faced with sugar. I eat well-balanced meals. I may not go the gym, but when I ride by it on my way home, I at least _think _about how I should sign up for a membership sometime."

"Sprinkles," Harvey said.

Mike hesitated.

"I'm just saying," he said, carefully avoiding the word _pencil_ because he _did _want ice cream, dammit, "that I think I figured everything out, and it's going to be fine."

Two days later he would be in the hospital.


	4. Chapter 4

**Chapter Four**

"So you're back to working at your own desk," Harvey said.

Mike leaned back, and if someone could lean back in a second-rate desk chair defiantly, that was what he was doing. Harvey bit the inside of his lip to keep from smiling. Say what he would—and had—about Mike's crazed conspiracy theories about the Bermuda Triangle pencil and his own disappearing paperwork, he wasn't clueless about how this sudden retreat to his own designated space was Mike's insane but still possibly spirited offense to take a stand. He still deserved to be mocked for it, but Harvey could settle into that a little more gradually.

Mike said loudly that yes, he really was back to working here, because he was sure that whatever had been going on was absolutely and completely fixed now. He then directed a glare somewhat generally around the room.

He was making the whole not smiling thing a little difficult.

"Maybe tone down the bravado a notch, kid," Harvey said in a much lower voice. "Can I trust that you're actually going to _do _work down here instead of just play detective?"

"You got detective? I was going for cowboy. You know, white hat, black hat, get out of town by sunset or I'll run you out on a rail—"

Harvey tuned him out when he basically started reciting the entirety of _High Noon_, but when the smile finally made it out onto his face, he didn't like that it was more wistful than anything else. As much as Mike could be distracting in a shared space—"Hey, Harvey, did you know that you have half a bag of M&Ms down here?" "Yes. They're from 2007, don't eat them. I keep forgetting to throw them out." "I don't think they go bad. Do they go bad? Google it. I mean, we could have M&Ms!"—he hadn't necessarily always completely and without reservation _minded_, exactly. Normally when he hit some sort of wall or needed a break, he tossed one of the baseballs around; he'd just changed that to "have marathon movie quote session with Mike." Obviously one of them looked a little more Zen and mysterious, but still—

It wasn't like he would _miss _sharing his office. No one in his right mind would miss watching Mike pace a furrow into the floor while he tried to reason something out. Or the fact that he _had _eventually eaten the M&Ms and then thrown up half an hour later and refused to admit that there might, maybe, have been some sort of connection. What Harvey was feeling was just some strange vestige of sentimentality. Like a phantom limb of emotional attachment.

"You don't have to come back down here," he said recklessly. "You could keep working upstairs."

He really had spent too much time with Mike: he was losing control of what came out of his mouth.

Mike stared at him in that way that made his eyes look as big as saucers. It was the look that Harvey didn't like because it had a disturbing tendency to make him cave and give Mike whatever it was he was after, so he glanced at the top of Mike's head instead. Finally, Mike said, "You miss me."

"I'm talking to you," Harvey said. "I can't miss you when I'm talking to you. Not that I would anyway."

"But you're going to miss me when you get upstairs."

Maybe. "No," he said, with exaggerated slowness. "But I don't want another week of, 'Oh, Harvey, the copier must have _eaten _your files' and 'Oh, Harvey, I think the office is haunted.'"

"I never said that! And I don't preface everything with 'oh, Harvey' either."

"No, but you left your search history of 'paranormal activity law office' on my computer."

"We were working really late! I was sleep-deprived."

"I also noticed the string that went from 'bad M&Ms' to 'bad M&Ms vomit' to 'bad M&Ms death' in the space of about thirty panicky seconds."

"I really just need to use my laptop," Mike said. He shook his head. "Doesn't change anything. You're afraid you're going to miss me." He drained the last of his coffee. "Once I straighten things out down here, I can totally move upstairs. It'll be like the Odd Couple. You'd be Felix, because you have this aversion to me touching anything, and I'd be—"

"You know what?" Harvey said. "I take it back. You should stay here and sort out your paranormal activity. I think somehow I'll soldier on in your absence."

He was halfway to the door before he realized that he hadn't interrupted Mike—that he had only spoken in some lacuna left by Mike suddenly dropping off midsentence. At full-speed, full-tilt exuberance, he had just stopped talking. Getting that now was like stepping into a cold spot—the hair on the back of his neck stood up and his skin raised a welter of gooseflesh even underneath his clothes. He whipped around so quickly that the faint whistle of air from his turn sounded as loud to him as a siren going through his head like a drill, and he was back at Mike's desk before he really understood that he had moved.

The last time he remembered feeling anything even remotely like this, his little brother had caught up to him in the park one day—Harvey was supposed to have been watching him, paying close attention, but he'd gotten caught up in a baseball game, in the way he was pitching them all _into the ground_, hardly anyone getting past him, but then his brother was tugging on his sleeve, saying, "Harvey, Harvey, can I go look for the dog? I want to go look for the _dog_." And when Harvey asked what he was even talking about—they didn't have a dog—his little brother had pointed off somewhere at the edge of the park and said, "The man said he lost his dog and could I help him look for it. I can help, right? I'll be right back. I want to find the _dog_."

He had taken his brother to the police and had the kid describe the man even as his brother sniffled and said, "But he was _nice_," and Harvey's mind hadn't been working right the whole time. Just a blur of fear as cold as ice.

Mike had fallen back behind his desk—all Harvey could see of him was the top of his head. Harvey went around and got down on his knees, next to Mike, next to the damned sticky drawer. Mike was batting his hands against his throat and clawing at it wherever he could make contact. Harvey yelled—screamed—for someone to call 911. He grabbed Mike's hands and held them to stop him from raking his throat bloody. Mike's face was red, at least, not—thank God—blue, and Harvey could hear the rattle of his breath, which sounded like the loudest thing in the room, but Mike was clearly under the impression that he couldn't get any air and _why wasn't Harvey helping him_. He thrashed, trying to knock himself out of Harvey's grip, but Harvey held on.

"Mike," he said, "Mike, _Mike_. Listen to me. _Listen to me_. You're breathing. Okay? You're breathing just fine. You can breathe. Try to say something."

"Harvey," Mike said, through a wheeze that sounded like he'd forced his voice out through a grater, stripping it of anything but raw sound.

"That's good, Mike, really good. If you can talk, you can breathe, okay? You know that. You probably read something about it, right? If you can talk, you can breathe, and no one has _ever _gotten you to stop talking. No one in the world. Okay?" He rubbed Mike's hands like he was trying to keep him warm, which was, so far as he could tell when his mind was working, a pretty goddamn stupid thing to be doing, but he couldn't stop. "Talk to me, kid."

"Harvey," Mike said again.

"Damn right." He searched his mind for something to ask. "_Godfather Part II _or _II_?"

He had to be impressed that through tears of pain and sheer unadulterated panic, Mike actually managed to give him a serious _what the hell _look. Mike being Mike, Harvey couldn't tell if that was about him asking any question right now or about asking _that _question ever. He breathed out something that sounded like _two _and then maybe an obscenity or two.

"Just making sure you're still in there," Harvey said. He let go of Mike's hands, because chafing them like Mike had frostbite instead of near asphyxiation wasn't getting him anywhere, but Mike reached up and grabbed for him again, his hands hot and sweaty and desperate.

"Stay," Mike whispered. Harvey wondered how much it had cost him to get just that one word out, and how badly he must have needed to say it if he would go to all the trouble. He locked his hands firmly around Mike's in response and moved him a little, bringing Mike's head up to rest on his knee. At a loss for what to do—it had been years since he'd had to comfort anyone, years since his brother's skinned knees and knockout bouts of flu—he went back to that idiotic rubbing, kneading little circles into Mike's hands. His own fingers felt rigid and wooden, like marionette joints.

"I wasn't leaving," he said, although he had no idea why he was offering an explanation right now, when he could tell by Mike's eyes that he was so terrified he couldn't think. He cut himself off. "I'm right here, Mike, okay? I've got you. Someone's going to get you help. You're going to be fine." He dug his fingers in harder into Mike's unyielding hands to prove it. It was possible that he was doing more harm than good, holding on so hard, but his hands wouldn't loosen properly and Mike seemed, above all else, to not want him to let go. This was the option they were stuck with.

Mike might have been breathing a little better now, or Harvey might just have been getting more used to the strangled sound he made trying to suck in some air—he liked to think it wasn't that.

"Pencil," Mike said, with the same effort and concentration that he'd said, "Stay," and Harvey almost laughed.

"Shut up about the damned pencil. Breathe."

"_Pencil_," Mike said, so insistently that Harvey didn't hush him this time. "You. Pencil. I want." He threw his head back, cracking it against Harvey's kneecap in a blow that sent pain radiating up and down his leg in bright, hot spikes. His face was shading a little too much towards purple now, and, having half-delivered whatever message he'd had, his eyes were bright, bottomless, and utterly emptied out of thought. If he said anything else now, it was just going to be _Harvey _again—though how Harvey was so sure of that, he could never have said.

He didn't let go of Mike's hands, but he bent down and said, next to Mike's ear, "I'll find it out. Whatever it is. Calm down. I'll figure it out," hoping that each sentence would fall like a battering ram against Mike's desperation and somehow reach him. And in fact his breathing _did _settle down a fraction, the blue tint going out from his face again. Harvey didn't try to convince him to talk again—now that he understood that he could get air, the effort to find it seemed to exhaust him. He just watched the color of Mike's face and the color of his fingertips, the one red and the other bleached dead white from all the helpless pressure that Harvey was exerting on him, both their bones threatening to crack under the strain. He was somewhat aware that he was talking—nothing special, just the too quickly mundane litany of reassurance that Mike would be fine, that Harvey had him, that help was on the way—and that trying to stop was as futile as trying to let go.

When the paramedics arrived, it took him too long to understand that they wanted him up, and he was sure that he felt brisk, impersonal hands close over his own and pry him away from Mike—his joints popped and ached dully as he straightened them. They were black and blue and red, marked with the hard use of pressure, some stamp that caring had put on his skin. No doubt his knee was purple, too, where Mike had slammed his skull into it. Harvey couldn't feel much of it, though, which was strange.

One of the paramedics touched his shoulder briefly, and he caught the tail end of some question that might as well have been in Greek.

"What?" He turned his head around, distracted. What had he been looking for?

_The pencil_, something whispered, before he shoved that off to deal with it later.

"Do you want to stay with him?" the paramedic was asking. "You can ride along." It was good of her to have stayed to ask him with the stretcher already on the move—it was caring, he decided, and Mike would like her, which seemed at the moment to matter as much as any other thought he'd ever had.

He nodded. "I said I wouldn't leave," and followed her as she headed for the door. It seemed like every thought he had and everything he heard was coming in very, very slowly; trickling in like syrup. (Mike's pancakes.) He saw Louis standing somewhere off to the side and he knew after he did it that he had asked Louis to tell Jessica where he was going and why and he knew that Louis, cooperative in a crisis and actually someone Harvey wanted handling things right now, said that he would, and possibly even added something about Mike, about bringing back news, which couldn't be right—couldn't it?—because Louis hated Mike, except Mike worked for Pearson Hardman and Louis did too, and maybe, for Louis, that was enough. He trailed the paramedic out through the building, through the tight corridor of bystanders gaping at the stretcher's progress, and into the ambulance. Mike, stubborn as always, reached out for him.

"He should stay still," one of the other paramedics said.

"He'll stay still," Harvey said. He took Mike's hand again and tried, this time, to hold it more gently, with some respect for the fact that they were both bruised all to hell.

"Sir, we need you to fill these out," and then there was a clipboard with a thick stack of forms on it on his lap for some reason. "You can't—"

He held Mike's hand with his left and wrote with his right, half-daring them to comment. He filled in Mike's next-of-kin and all the medical information he knew and could think of. He couldn't remember the girlfriend's name and then could, and went back and added it, his handwriting a little wobbly without anything to steady the clipboard from rocking back and forth on his knees, but still all legible. No one would have anything to complain about. He was thorough—it was a good distraction from the way Mike sometimes shivered and then arched his back, trying to breathe with a body that didn't seem to want to, before finally collapsing again once he'd managed a shuddery breath or two. The paramedics injected him with something clear that first widened his eyes and then calmed him down, giving Harvey time and presence of mind enough to say, "I don't know all of this."

"It's fine. Leave it blank if you're not sure. And you're his…"

"He works for me," Harvey said, because he couldn't think of anything else to say. "I hired him."

That was true: he had hired Mike when no one else in their right mind would have. There was some saying, sentimental, half-remembered, about the things you took responsibility for once becoming yours forever. It wasn't anything he could easily define.

At the hospital, before they took Mike away to where he wasn't allowed to follow, he stole Mike's phone under the premise that they might not give him permission to take it and so there was no point in asking. He scrolled through Mike's contacts, amused despite everything to find his own home phone number listed as BAT CAVE, and found Jenny-the-girlfriend's number. It went to voicemail—good to know that Mike's tendency to leave his cell phone ringer on all day at work wasn't a generational thing—and he left a short but hopefully not too frightening message about what had happened, making sure to add that the paramedics had gotten Mike breathing better before they'd even taken him inside. He left her his number, too, in case she couldn't get away but needed information.

Then he called Mike's grandmother, which was harder. He promised to call again and tell her how Mike was just as soon as they let him see the kid.

"I'm glad he has you there, at least," she said. 'I'd give anything to be there for him."

Harvey was sure that Mike knew that, and said so.

After he hung up, he sat in that uncomfortable sculpted plastic chair for a minute with the phone pressed to his forehead, trying to regain whatever composure he had lost in this instant he had realized how strange it was for Mike to have just dropped out of a conversation mid-sentence. With strangers, he could essentially switch over to autopilot and be fine, but he intended to call Donna next, and while he didn't have to be polished for her after all these years, he wanted to draw the line in the sand that would stop him from breaking down, if it came to that. He thought of issues and precedents, recited Supreme Court Justices in order of confirmation, and did that American Film Institute Top 100, jamming up only around eighty-three or so. The cracked eggshell of his mind started to feel like it was coming back together, and so he dialed.

"Something's happened to Mike," he said when Donna answered. "He couldn't—he could barely breathe. I'm at the hospital with him. I need you to deal with things there until I can—"

"No, you don't," she said. "You need me there with you and with Mike. I'll get Norma to cover for me. And don't say that Louis won't share, because he will today. Don't think I won't make him."

"I have nothing but faith in you," he said. Donna rarely ignored something he'd told her to do, and past experience had taught him that if she did, it was because he was wrong, and he might as well accept it without argument. "Tell him that I owe him for taking care of things, for keeping everyone away from Mike and giving us some room down there. I won't forget it."

"I'll tell him, and I'll be right over. Take care of Mike."

"I'm trying," he said. The enormity of the waiting room sank into him then, and the thought of sitting there waiting to know about Mike without having someone to keep him company suddenly felt like standing at some precipice looking down into a bottomless pit. This was why he didn't argue with her when she made unilateral decisions about the way his life was going to go. When Donna got there twenty minutes later, faster than Harvey thought was logically possible—though it _was _Donna—he stood up and hugged her, and felt her hands press hard against his back with the exact same force he'd used to hold onto Mike: some sort of panic-induced attempt to drag the other person into you, where they would presumably be safe.

The two of them sat in silence until the doctor came out, found him, and said, "Harvey Specter? You're here for Mike Ross?"

Harvey stood up. "He goes by Mike," he said. It was an absurd distinction to make, but evidently the doctor had heard stranger than that in the ER waiting room, because she didn't even blink.

"Well, Mike's doing much better now. We managed to ease his breathing back to normal—no tubes—and he's sleeping. I'd say he's out of the woods, but we'd like to keep him overnight and possibly longer until we can sort out what caused such a violent reaction in the first place. If that's acceptable to you, of course."

"Fine," he said automatically, but then, "Why does it matter what I say about it?"

She consulted something on her clipboard—a different, slimmer stack of papers than the one he had so laboriously filled out on the ambulance ride over. "We have you listed as his emergency contact, with power-of-attorney?"

He wondered when Mike had filled that out, and why he had never mentioned anything about it. He shook his head. He wanted to tell Mike that there were a dozen people in his circle of friends—so long as they kept Trevor out of it—who were probably much better equipped to be taking care of him and making these kinds of decisions. His life wasn't something he wanted to put so blindly in Harvey's hands—he had to stop thinking that Harvey was anything more than he said he was, anything more than he'd been saying that he was for years, before Mike walked into a hotel room at the Chilton and spilled a suitcase full of weed all over the plush carpet. Mike had to come to his senses about who he was dealing with.

Though since he wouldn't be coming to his senses today, it didn't make much of a practical difference right now. "I don't want to see him like that again," he said to the doctor. "Keep him as long as you have to. If his insurance won't cover it, I will."

"Can we see him?" Donna asked.

"Just for a minute," the doctor said. "And try not to wake him. Don't stay any longer than five minutes—he really needs to rest, and any noise could be a potential disruption."

She pointed them towards Mike's room and warned them again about letting him rest, leading Harvey to suspect that he and Donna looked somehow naturally troublesome, or else that she—like a few doctors he'd met—had a natural dislike for lawyers as a class, thanks to a few too many frivolous malpractice cases in the wind over the years. He promised, as sheepishly as if she'd been his kindergarten teacher, to be good and quiet, and not wake Mike.

"Why would he give me power-of-attorney?" he asked Donna, to distract himself from the looming closeness of Mike's door, and the squeaking sound of his shoes against the black-flecked linoleum floor. "He trusts people too easily. That's a problem, especially when he does things like—"

"Don't even finish that," Donna said. "It's making you sound stupid. Look at your hands, Harvey—you held him, and you got him here, and you waited for him. I think he picked exactly the right person to look after his interests, and for that matter, since you're my emergency contact too, so did I. Not that I'll ever need you, since unlike Mike, I can go about my daily life on a regular basis with no near-fatal accidents."

"You can be sort of smug sometimes," Harvey said. "You know that, right?"

"Smug is for people who aren't justified in their eternal correctness."

Harvey didn't realize, after that, that he was holding his breath—not until he saw Mike's chest rising and falling steadily, normally, and then he heard himself let it go. Donna didn't say anything. All her attention was on Mike, anyway. She said, "He looks so—not-Mike," and stroked his hand, which was as purpled with bruises as Harvey's, and as richly dark as an eggplant where the IV had been threaded through. The same bruises—and a few maroon and now glossily medicated scratches—decorated his throat where he had gone after it to open up his windpipe. Harvey didn't like to look at that misshapen necklace shape—too aptly called a choker—but there wasn't much in the room he did want to look at. He settled for taking the other side of the bed and running his thumb over Mike's hand, wishing that, despite the doctor's numerous dropped anvils about how much Mike needed rest, that the kid would wake up for just a second—just long enough for Harvey to see that he really was okay. He put his fingers around Mike's wrist and felt the steady thrum of his pulse.

"When we're done here," he said quietly, "we need to call whatever leftover contacts I have from the district attorney's office, and see if we know anyone in homicide who will take my word for it that there's an attempted murder worth investigating."

Donna's eyes widened—good to know he could still surprise her every now and then. "You think someone—"

"Mike thought so." At least if Harvey had translated the urgency about the pencil as well as he'd thought he had. "And I told him I'd take care of it."

Donna nodded, convinced that if he said he would, then he would—he didn't deserve that from her anymore than he deserved it from Mike, probably—and said, "What are you going to do? If you find out that someone did this to him?"

Harvey had bent the law, broken it, and at times practically folded it into a paper hat, but there had always been lines he hadn't crossed on the theory that he would have to live the rest of his life in his own company, and he wanted to be someone that he could at least half-respect. When he looked at those gouges in Mike's throat, most of that didn't seem to matter as much as he'd always thought. He shrugged. What would he do?

"The right thing," he said. "—Eventually."

They stayed there with Mike until someone made them leave.


End file.
